At the top of the list, for me, is the behavior of President Bush that morning.

Once the second plane hit, it was obvious that there was a coordinated attack. If the President was not in on the plot, then there was every reason to believe that he was a likely next target. That being the case, he should have been immediately whisked off to an undisclosed location. He should not have remained in any previously-announced location –especially any previously-announced location where his presence also endangered the lives of children, such as a school. By dawdling for almost a half hour in a classroom – which, even worse, was near an airport – Bush was, at the very least, guilty of reckless endangerment. The only way he could not be putting himself and all those children in danger would be if he knew enough about the plot to know that he personally was not a target.

Furthermore, Bush, as the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, had an obligation to turn his full attention to the attack ASAP. By not having done so, he is, at the very least, guilty of criminal negligence, if not treason.

Let me digress, for a moment, to the first day of the Iraq war in 2003. On the first day of the invasion, I heard an interview with one of the generals on the radio. The general was asked a question about the “weapons of mass destruction.” I don’t remember the general’s exact words, but his answer was something to the effect of, “oh, we’ll worry about them later.” I thought, wait a minute! If you’ve just invaded a country that really does have weapons of mass destruction, you don’t worry about them later, you worry about them immediately. Destroying them should be your top strategic priority. Thus I figured out, on the first day of the war, that the WMD excuse must have been a lie. Sure enough, later it turned out that I was right.

This example does not absolutely prove, as a universal rule, that whenever high officials who should be acting like they’re in obvious danger don’t act like they’re in danger, this necessarily and always means that they must be lying about the nature of the danger. However, when high officials who should be acting like they’re in obvious danger don’t act like they’re in danger, this is indeed good grounds for suspicion about the nature of the danger.

Then there’s the question of how and why the Pentagon was allowed to be hit, over a half hour after the second of the Twin Towers was hit, and why none of the four hijacked planes were even intercepted.

First there was the “failure of imagination” excuse. A blatant lie. If the “war games” prove nothing else, they prove, at the very least, that the possibility of hijacked planes crashing into buildings was something that NORAD had not only thought of, but specifically trained for.

The 9/11 Commission Report claims that the FAA didn’t notify NORAD soon enough, but this contradicts earlier timelines from NORAD as well as from the FAA.

Another excuse is the Popular Mechanicsclaim that intercepts were rare, and that, between 1991 and 2001, there was only one intercept outside of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this seems to be contradicted by a 1994 United States General Accounting Office report on continental air defense, which said the following about intercepts back in the early 1990’s:

Overall, during the past 4 years, NORAD’s alert fighters took off to intercept aircraft (referred to as scrambled) 1,518 times, or an average of 15 times per site per year. Of these incidents, the number of suspected drug smuggling aircraft averaged one per site, or less than 7 percent of all of the alert sites’ total activity. The remaining activity generally involved visually inspecting unidentified aircraft and assisting aircraft in distress.

“Assisting aircraft in distress” does not sound like the sort of activity that would have been confined to an ADIZ.

(Thanks to John Doraemi for calling my attention to the GAO report.)

Yet another excuse is that there were no scramble-ready fighter planes at Andrews Air Force Base, the base nearest to Washington, D.C. If true, this raises more questions than it answers. Why on Earth were there no scramble-ready fighter planes at Andrews Air Force Base, of all places? And who on Earth made that decision? One would think that Washington, D.C. would be the single most important place to defend, hence the single most important place to have scramble-ready fighter planes at all times.

Previously, I’ve explored these matters in the following posts (listed in forward chronological order, oldest first):

I don’t believe there was an explicit stand-down order. That would have been too obvious. What I do suspect is that various things may have been done to slow down NORAD’s response, and that not having scramble-ready planes at Andrews Air Force Base may have been one of them.

9/11 provided the perfect excuse for a war which otherwise would have been very difficult to sell to the American public, given what horrible luck the Soviets had had in Afghanistan back in the 1980’s. 9/11 provided an excuse, not only for a war in Afghanistan, but also for a century of imperialistic “war on terror.”

In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, a former Egyptian army officer named Emad A. Salem. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992. Salem’s role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects.

Salem, initially believing that this was to be a sting operation, claimed that the FBI’s original plan was for Salem to supply the conspirators with a harmless powder instead of actual explosive to build their bomb, but that the FBI chose to use him for other purposes instead. [11] He secretly recorded hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers; reported by Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1993, section A,Page 1.[12]

In December 1993, James M. Fox, the head of the FBI’s New York Office, denied that the FBI had any foreknowledge of the attacks.[citation needed] The 1993 WTC sting operation was depicted as a false flag operation and was a plot device for the 1996 movie The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis.

Of course, this doesn’t prove anything about the attacks of 9/11/2001. But it does show a possible precedent, as does the history of known false flag operations. (See the Wikipedia article on false flag operations, and see my post False flag terror (Review of 911proof.com, Part 1) – November 16, 2007.)

Both the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks happened during the first year of the first term of a new U.S. president. We can only hope that this pattern won’t repeat itself, but I’m not looking forward to 2009.

Above, I’ve listed what I consider to be the most important grounds for suspicion. The above issues are also the ones I’ve looked at in enough depth to be reasonably confident that they are indeed valid grounds for strong suspicion (although not, in and of themselves, absolute proof of government complicity).

Another issue that’s important, but one I haven’t yet researched in detail beyond reading various claims and counterclaims, is Osama bin Laden’s history and the question of what connection, if any, he might still have had with the CIA, either directly or via Pakistan. He was once a U.S. ally back in the 1980’s. Of course, erstwhile allies can sometimes turn into genuine enemies. (Saddam Hussein was once a U.S. ally too.) But some people suspect that Osama bin Laden may have turned into a fake enemy, with the role of creating excuses for U.S. imperialism. Are there any solid grounds for such suspicion? That’s an issue I should explore eventually, though it’s not at the top of my priority list right now.

I am inclined to believe that there were indeed real live human hijackers on 9/11, even if the FBI might have been mistaken about the identities of some of them. Some people believe that there were no human hijackers at all, and that the attacks were fully automated and/or remote-controlled. To me this seems very unlikely. For one thing, it implies that the phone calls from passengers and crew must all have been faked. To fake all those phone calls convincingly enough to fool family members and co-workers would have been a huge project, requiring extensive voice samples and knowledge of the individuals’ family situations and personal idiosyncrasies. Still, applying the standard of “innocent until proven guilty” to the alleged hijackers, I should wait with concluding definitively that there were real live human hijackers until I’ve had a good hard look at what’s known about the FBI’s investigation.

Another issue I have not yet researched in depth, beyond reading various claims and counterclaims, is the “put options” which are said to indicate that some people had advance knowledge of 9/11 and used that knowledge to make huge profits in the stock market.

I do think we should reject any hypothesis that requires a large number of knowingly complicit people. With too many people, or with insufficiently motivated people, the “someone would have talked” argument becomes valid counterevidence. I’m not sure exactly how big a reasonable maximum would be, but probably no more than a dozen people besides Bush and Cheney. Thus, for example, I’m inclined to reject any hypothesis that requires the knowing complicity of anyone in either the FDNY or the NYPD.

(P.S., 12/24/2007: Regarding some of the points of contention within the above “other issues,” see Deceitful Tactics of the “Debunkers” by John Doraemi, Monday, October 29, 2007. One minor error I noticed here: Doraemi refers to false blips on FAA radar screens, whereas his linked source refers to false blips on NORAD radar screens. I have yet to research most of the other issues discussed on that page.)

The most important issue is that 9/11 has not yet been investigated by any official entity, with subpoena power, that was independent of the Bush administration. Such independence would be needed for an honest investigation of even the possibility of negligence or incompetence, let alone anything worse, on the part of high officials in the Bush administration. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to be beholden only to Congress and not the executive branch, but was in fact run by people like Philip Zelikow, with close ties to the Bush administration.

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First of all, since you are a rare personality of truth movement because you do actual research, let me point you to the page of Mike Williams/911myths about Bin Laden. You won’t be so sure about him being an US ally anymore.http://911myths.com/index.php/Bin_Laden_CIA_links

About intercepts of planes originating from continental US. There is no proof of any other than Payne Stewart’s plane. And why is it so suspicious there were no scramble-ready fighters in Andrews? Remember, the threat of an attack was to be from outside US borders.

WTC 7, you always bring up how “it looked suspicious”. For you to make that assumption, you should know the exact details of the structure design, and calculate how it actually should have collapsed. Otherwise, you just wouldn’t know. Have you seen the latest NIST update?

Afghanistan. If this was such a clever “inside job”, why didn’t it involve any Afghan hijackers? Stupid NWO. Why would they need an excuse to invade Afghanistan, of all places.

Put options weren’t even the highest of that single year. If a United Airlines spike of 8,072 in March didn’t suggest an imminent attack, then why should 3,150 puts in September have any more effect? See, once again, the great work of Mike, and follow all the links on that page:http://www.911myths.com/html/put_options.html

How can you, similar to Jim Hoffman, suggest only a dozen of people would be complicit? You are still talking about the possible demolition of WTC7, lack of air defences, suspicious secret service activity, Bin Laden/CIA links, put options, excuses for wars, etc. A dozen people?

The order in which you replied to my points differs from the order in which I wrote them, so I’ll rearrange the order of your reply too, below.

First, about Bush at the school: I’ll reply in a separate post later, probably tomorrow.

About intercepts of planes originating from continental US. There is no proof of any other than Payne Stewart’s plane.

I didn’t provide proof in the form of stories about specific individual airplanes, but did you read what I wrote about that GAO report I cited?

I might be able to come up with something more specific by digging around some more in GAO reports. This will probably require some trips to libraries, which hopefully I’ll have time for sometime within the next month or so.

And why is it so suspicious there were no scramble-ready fighters in Andrews? Remember, the threat of an attack was to be from outside US borders.

Washington, D.C. is on the East Coast, so Andrews Air Force Base is still a logical place to have scramble-ready planes even if you’re thinking just in terms of an attack from outside U.S. borders. Furthermore, Washington, D.C. would have been one of the most likely destinations for any attacking planes from outside U.S. borders. So, obviously, Washington, D.C. would have needed to be defended against those planes from overseas.

Moreover, if the “war games” prove nothing else, they prove that there were training exercises for other kinds of threats as well, including the possibility of hijacked planes crashing into buildings. So, while the perceived threat was primarily from outside, it wasn’t only from outside.

WTC 7, you always bring up how “it looked suspicious.” For you to make that assumption, you should know the exact details of the structure design, and calculate how it actually should have collapsed. Otherwise, you just wouldn’t know.

Not with certainty, but the way it collapsed nevertheless looks very unlikely.

I’ve been meaning to write some more detailed posts about WTC 7 for a while now. I can’t promise exactly when, since there have been plenty of distractions, but hopefully within the next few weeks.

Thanks, I hadn’t seen that. The collapse hypothesis is similar to what I’ve already seen in some other papers I’ve looked at. More about this in one of my promised forthcoming posts on WTC 7.

Anyhow, in the chart on page 4, one of the things that is said to have been “completed” is the “Fire Dynamics Analysis FDS.” I’m interested in learning more about the fires in WTC 7. Have you seen a draft or a summary of that “Fire Dynamics Analysis” anywhere, or anything else NIST might have published already about the fires in WTC 7 (besides the relevant pages in Appendix L of NIST’s June 2004 progress report, which I’ve seen)? Offhand I don’t find any such thing via a quick look through wtc.nist.gov .

Looking at Appendix L – Interim Report on WTC 7 (PDF) in NIST’s June 2004 Progress Report, I notice quite a few fires, early in the day, in different, apparently unconnected parts of the building. The report also notes an absence of diesel smells, so apparently the fires were not caused by ruptured diesel tanks. (None of the tanks or generators were above the 9th floor, in any case. Locations of the tanks and generators are given in Chapter 5 (PDF) of the FEMA report.)

Multiple unconnected fires in one building are, in and of themselves, suspicious, as a possible sign of arson. Of course, the building had been hit by debris in multiple places too, so I’ll have to take a closer look at the fire locations and how they compare with the debris damage locations. More about this in a future post.

Afghanistan. If this was such a clever “inside job”, why didn’t it involve any Afghan hijackers?

Osama bin Laden was already in Afghanistan, and his presence there was already an alleged reason for the forthcoming war even before 9/11. See the first of the news stories I cited. Creating a brand new Afghan “terrorist group” would have been unnecessary extra work.

Stupid NWO.

NWO? You’re talking to the wrong person. I’m not a “NWO” scaremonger. See my various posts about anti-Illuminism.

Why would they need an excuse to invade Afghanistan, of all places.

I’m not sure exactly what all of Bush’s reasons were for wanting to invade Afghanistan. But his reasons are not at all crucial to my argument. Whatever his reasons might have been, the following are known historical facts: (1) There were plans and ongoing preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan before 9/11. (2) The invasion would have been very difficult to sell to the American public without 9/11, given what horrible luck the Soviets had had in Afghanistan back in the 1980’s.

First of all, since you are a rare personality of truth movement because you do actual research, let me point you to the page of Mike Williams/911myths about Bin Laden. You won’t be so sure about him being an US ally anymore.http://911myths.com/index.php/Bin_Laden_CIA_links

I’m already aware that there’s controversy over whether there were direct ties between the U.S. and bin Laden. This is why I said, “either directly or via Pakistan.”

The focus of many of the quotes on the above page is on the chain of funding. This doesn’t rule out the possibility of informal ties on levels other than funding, e.g. via family friendships. As I said, though, this is one of the “other issues” I’ll need to research further.

About the “put options,” another one of those “other issues” that I said I’ll need to research further: When I say I’ve looked at “claims and counterclaims” on a given issue, the “counterclaims” usually include a relevant page on the “9/11 Myths” site, sometimes one or more other “debunking” sites too. Obviously I don’t accept Mike’s research as the final word.

How can you, similar to Jim Hoffman, suggest only a dozen of people would be complicit? You are still talking about the possible demolition of WTC7, lack of air defences, suspicious secret service activity, Bin Laden/CIA links, put options, excuses for wars, etc. A dozen people?

Let’s count how many people this requires:

1) Demolition or supplementary arson of WTC, including 7: (a) At least one insider in a position of authority at the WTC, possibly Silverstein, or possibly someone in the Port Authority, or possibly someone at Securacom. Maybe two such insiders. (b) Several people to plant whatever substances or devices were used, under the guise of whatever sort of maintenance. Let’s say six maximum. Maybe just three or four.

2) Lack of air defense: (a) One person to make administrative decisions, e.g. on which Air Force bases did or didn’t have scramble-ready planes. This could have been Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or some other high-ranking person in the Defense Department. (b) One person to put false blips on radar screens, if that was done, or to generate some other source of confusion, if not false radar blips.

3) No more than maybe two or three people in the Secret Service, if that many, possibly just one. See my forthcoming post about the issue of Bush and the school.

4) Al Qaeda liaison: Just one person if there was a direct tie, three or four people otherwise.

5) Put options (if indeed this happened): No additional people needed. Just people already in on the plot, taking personal advantage of their knowledge.

6) Excuses for wars: No additional people needed. The people involved in preparing for the war in Afghanistan need not have been told anything about what was going to be done to drum up support for said war.

The above adds up to somewhere between 8 and 17 people. The “dozen” I suggested earlier is in the middle of that range.

Did I miss anything?

P.S.: Thinking about this some more, as I will explain in my next post (either later tonight or tomorrow), it’s not necessary for any Secret Service personnel to be involved at all. This cuts my totals down to 7 people minimum, 14 maximum. But I suppose we should add in a few more people as planners and/or administrators, bringing the totals back up.

Hello from Germany,
I just want to add my main reason to doubt the official story. I know that it might sound very cynical; but my main reason to doubt the official story is rarely ever mentioned at all: the low number of so-called “casualties”. And I say this without becoming an amateurish-engineer: “terrorists” would have tried to kill as many people as possible with the least effort. Those, who did perpetrate 911, murdered as much people as necessary and as few people as possible with a lot of effort. To put it more precisely: they murdered just enough people to reach their goals.

Just think about it: The Pentagon. How easy would it have been to just smash the plane just on top of the building?
New York: How many people would have died, when only one the 3 WTC-buildings would not have collapsed into it’s own footprints?

It just sounds like a cynical textbook, just like following a script. They wanted a New Pearl Harbour (about 3000 people killed); and they created it. They didn’t murder less, they didn’t murder more people than necessary to archieve their goals. Exactly this – put into the context of the official story – is one or two accidents too many for me.

I’m still kind of biased. As a leftist, I do think that there are more important things than 911. Even if Bush, Cheney etc. would admit having perpetrated 911 tomorrow, it wouldn’t change much. And this is exactly, what the 911-truth movement seems to believe. If the US-public, if the world-public would know the truth, everything would change.
Listen to my thesis now: nothing would change, at least nothing to write home about. It would just be another “scandal”. Like MyLay, like Watergate etc.

It would gain nearly as much media coverage and public outburst as Lewinsky. If not less.
They would maintain that they did it out of desperation to save America, to wake up America. The Republicans would say that they are in the biggest crisis ever in their history, that they have to step back and start all over again. The neoliberal democrats would take over for about 12 years or so and do the same as the republicans with a more polite rhetoric. Nothing to write home about. And after 12 years or 8 years, a new young republican leader… blablabla.

But it’s hard for me to understand that so many leftists seem to think: whatever those in power have done and might do: they didn’t do that! Those, who don’t care about bombing Irak back to the stone-age and beyond, those who don’t care poisining their own soldiers with depleted uranium, those who don’t care about human rights and torture wouldn’t go so far to kill 3000 US-citicens to archieve their goals…???? Really?

By the way: noone has to become a structural engineer to understand New Orleans or Iraq or Vietnam or Abu Ghraib or the industrial genocide in Ausschwitz. Why this nearly religious believe that if only the truth about 911 is revealed, everything will change?

She may well be ‘anti alex jones’ and not buy all the illuminati/masonic rubbish spewed by the ‘truth’ movement, but she is hitting the fundamental problem which makes 9-11 ‘truth’ an irrational position: Everyone has to be in on it.

‘Truthers’ embrace the NWO/Illuminati/Reptoid/Masonic BS because they have to. Without some all powerful cabal working behind the scenes to suppress the investigation they all so desperately want to see, there is no excuse for all this obvious evidence to go untouched by either the worlds media or the political opposition parties.

I do believe there’s a cabal powerful enough to suppress or at least greatly hinder investigations. From that, there’s no reason to conclude that this same cabal is capable of micromanaging the entire world in a coherent fashion and has been doing so for centuries.

Suppressing an investigation, at least for a while, isn’t too difficult for a small group of high officials to accomplish. As for “opposition parties,” the Democratic Party has been awfully darned cowardly on a bunch of other issues too. As for 9/11 in particular, there are a lot of influential people who have a vested interest in not questioning the status quo, even though the vast majority of these people are not knowingly complicit in the crime itself.

I would appreciate it very much if some JREFer reading this comment could post a link to it in the above-linked JREF thread and call uk_dave’s attention to it.

I just found your blog today. Before reading the title of the blog, as a New Yorker myself, I thought the person writing this must be from New York City. You just have to be from NYC to know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, I appreciate your reasoned analysis and the obvious thought you’ve put into this. I will be reading more of this blog in the near future and hope to provide some substantive comments.